


New Old Hurt

by Brosephine (SaturnOolaa)



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Gen, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Past Female Lavellan/Solas, Vallaslin, pre-slash if you want to take it that way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-16
Updated: 2015-11-16
Packaged: 2018-05-01 20:34:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5219888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaturnOolaa/pseuds/Brosephine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Solas took something from her, and Sera tries to give it back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	New Old Hurt

    Nehari woke up to a tickling sensation, like a feather brushing gently against her face.  
  
    By the light streaming in from the east-facing windows she made to it be early morning, not long after dawn. Sera was beside her on the bed, leaning over her intently, a fine-tipped paintbrush in her hand. Her face was screwed up in a grimace of concentration. The moment she registered that Nehari's eyes were open, she sprung away from her, dove off the bed, and rolled underneath it in one smooth motion.  
  
    "Sera? ...What are you doing?"  
  
    There was no answer from under the bed.  
  
    Nehari touched her hand to her cheek and found that it came away black. Slowly, catiously, she pulled herself out of bed and walked over to the mirror.  
  
    She might have expected curse words, or crudely-drawn genitals. She would have known how to feel about those things.  
  
    "Sera," she said, feeling as though she might still be asleep, "these... these are my vallaslin."  
  
    "Yeah," said Sera, who had pulled herself out from under the bed while Nehari wasn't looking, and was now sitting up against it with her arms around her knees.  
  
    "But... they're perfect." She had meant to exclaim it. Instead, the words came out in almost a whisper. "How did you remember them?"  
  
    "Dunno," responded Sera, sullenly.  
  
    Nehari examined her face in the mirror. It was a surreal experience: only the texture of the paint and a few last missing strokes of the paintbrush gave any indication she wasn't looking at the same vallaslin she'd had since she came of age. Like the branches of a great tree, they spread from the bridge of her nose out across her forehead. Every brushstroke was exactly right, every gentle curve as graceful as her Keeper had drawn them. Even the lines bisecting her eyebrows had been faithfully replicated.  
  
    "I can't believe it," she said, for lack of anything better to say. Solas had wondered aloud to her once if Sera might not have a kind of instinctual elven knowledge, passed down to her through the ages. Nehari had rolled her eyes and told him this was absurd and sentimental, but now, staring in the mirror at her old face returned to her, she had to wonder.  
  
    Of course, Solas would hardly be pleased to see her like this. It was he who had said that she was better than what the vallaslin represented. At the time, those words had made her feel certain that she was doing the right thing in erasing them from her face. Now, every time she looked in a mirror, she became less and less sure.  
  
    "Just... felt weird, looking at you without your elfy tattoos. That's all." Sera's voice broke her from her thoughts. She had already picked herself up off the floor and was standing beside her at the mirror. "It was Baldy, right?" An edge entered her voice. "He took em, the night he broke it off."  
  
    Hurt rose up in Nehari's chest. Staring at her face in the mirror, she willed it to stay calm. "It's... it's not that simple."  
  
    Sera, clearly unconvinced, glared at the floor as though she saw Solas's face in the stone. "Like fun it is. He leads you on, steals your ink, and then up and calls it quits? What's his game, anyway?"  
  
    "He didn't *steal* them, Sera." Nehari chose to ignore the bit about Solas leading her on, although a small, ungracious part of her felt vindicated to hear it. Still, the greater part of her rose up to defend him. Despite everything, she still believed that his intentions had been good. "He asked if I wanted him to remove them, and I said yes."  
  
    "Why?" Sera looked incredulous. "They're important, right? I mean, I don't give two figs about it, but you lot are so obsessed with tradition and your heritage and whatever, so don't tell me you just - "  
  
    "The Dalish were wrong about the vallaslin. Solas told me."  
  
    She almost wanted to tell Sera exactly how wrong they had been. Then Sera would laugh at the stupid, stuck-up, elfy Dalish, mistaking slavers' brands for something sacred and precious, and Nehari could get angry at her and yell at her to leave, and then she would be alone. But she had already decided, at least for now, that she would tell no one what Solas had shared with her.  
  
    "They don't mean what we thought," she said, instead, hating how weak it sounded.  
  
    Sera made a farting sound. "Who cares? They're just pretty marks on your face. They can mean whatever you want. Why should Solas get to be the one to decide?" Her hands clenched into fists. "Who died and made him the expert on this bullshit? He's all 'our people blahdy-blahdy-blah' until he's all 'I do not have much in common with the elves.' Well, make up your mind, you bloody smug fuckface!"  
  
    "Sera, it's all right."  
  
    "It's not all right!" Sera finally looked her in the eyes. Her face was blazing with a sort of furious misery. "He **hurt** you!"  
  
    The words cut her open.  
  
    She had worked so hard, this last week, to carry on as though nothing had changed. The first time she had walked through Skyhold with her face bare and felt everyone's eyes on her, it had been all she could do to hold her head high and keep walking - but she had done it. Even when Cole had come out of his shadowy attic to offer her comfort, she had turned him gently away. It was too much to hear her pain spoken out loud. She had tried to be strong.  
  
    That it should be Sera, of all people, to finally draw her feelings so close to the surface she could no longer push them back down...  
  
    Nehari felt tears welling up in her eyes. For the first time since Solas had told her he was sorry, she allowed them to fall.  
  
    "Yes," she said, her voice breaking, "he did."  
  
    "Oh. Shit." Sera looked horrified. "Oh, no, don't cry! Piss!" She raised her arm and patted Nehari on the shoulder - gingerly, as though making the gesture for the first time. "You'll ruin them!"  
  
    Nehari couldn't help but chuckle, even as the tears kept on coming. "So... they're not permanent?"  
  
    "Nonono, it's just face-painty stuff. The posh kind. Nicked it off Dorian, tinkered a bit to get the colour right, that's all." Sera rummaged around in her pockets. Finally, she reached down into the bosom of her shirt and pulled a handkerchief out from between her breasts. "Here, they still look good... you can wipe 'em off if you want, though... just, I didn't do it to make you cry."  
  
    "I know you didn't," she responded quietly, accepting the handkerchief. "Thank you, Sera."  
  
    If anything, Sera looked even more horrified. "Shit, don't thank me!"  
  
    Nehari sat down on the bed. She continued to cry for some time, blotting her face with the handkerchief, trying as best she could not to smudge the paint below her eyes. She could always wash the marks off later.  
  
    Sera sat beside her, patting her sporadically on the shoulder in a way that was only comforting because of the intent behind it.  
  
    "You know," she said, sounding unusually tentative, "I bet I could find somebody to do you some new ones. If you wanted em. There's a Jenny in Val Royeax who's a proper genius with ink and a needle, I could have him here day after tomorrow, you just say the word..."  
  
    The idea was so offensive it could have made Nehari furious, but coming from Sera, now, it was strangely sweet. She still had no idea how she felt about the vallaslin - whether it was better for the world to know what they had once meant, whether that old meaning would forever taint the new meaning her people had given them, whether or not she had made the right decision - but now, it seemed easier to live with that uncertainty. She had always felt better after a good cry.  
  
    "Absolutely not," she told Sera, but she said it with a smile.  
  
    Sera nodded evenly. "Right. Okay. Just a thought, that's all."  
  
    There was a stretch of silence - not unpleasant.  
  
    "Want me to shove a beehive under his desk?"  
  
    "No."  
  
    "Not even a little one?"  
  
    "Honestly, I don't know that it would even bother him. He rather likes bees."  
  
    "Wasps' nest, then."  
  
    Nehari laughed.  
  
    "Maybe."  
  
***  
  
    ("I must say," says Dorian, as they sit at the bar that evening, "I'm impressed that you remembered them so precisely."  
  
    Sera shrugged her shoulders. "See something enough times,  you're bound to remember it. Then it's just putting it back where it belongs. Dunno what's so hard about that."  
  
    "Do you spend a great deal of time looking at her face, then?"  
  
    "What?" Sera snorts, loudly, cheeks going red. "No, that's stupid. What'dya say that for? No, that's rubblsh, that is, I don't do that. I never look at her face. What do you know about it anyway? *You* spend a great deal of time looking at her stupid face!"  
  
    Dorian takes a sip of wine, to hide his smile.)

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like Sera has too many issues around "elfyness" for her and Lavellan to have a healthy romance, at least during the events of the game. But I really like the idea of Sera developing a grudging respect/possible secret shameful crush on her, and everything else about this story flowed from there.


End file.
